Computers, Legos, Evolution and Complexity
One of my first part-time jobs during college was at a neighborhood PC store. You would walk in and order a new machine by selecting the spec you would like and I would assemble it from the components. Back in the golden days of Pentium II, Windows 98 and Red Hat 5.2. Long before Apple became the behemoth it currently is and the major switch to laptops, building machines from scratch was relatively common (at least around my neck of the woods). By the time I got this job I had already built several machines for myself or for friends so it wasn’t too hard of a gig. I just doing for profit what I was already doing for fun!
If you’ve never done it, building a desktop machine might seem like a daunting task, but it’s surprisingly simple. You buy a desktop box and this will serve as the frame from which all the other parts hang. Boxes (or “boxen” as the cool kids back then used to say) usually come with a power source, but depending on your needs you might want to get your own. The most important piece of the machine is the motherboard. This is a large (almost as large as the box) circuit board that screws directly to the metal box and to which all other electronic components connect to.
If you think of the motherboard as the nervous system of the machine, then the CPU is the brain power and the RAM is the short term memory and the hard drive the…
